A mentee who runs a private university's graduate program wrote to me the week after Dartmouth College's men's basketball players voted 13 to 2 to join SEIU Local 560 on March 5, 2024. Her question had nothing to do with basketball. She wanted to know whether a regional director's finding that athletes are employees under the National Labor Relations Act would reach her doctoral students before the next contract cycle. I used to answer that kind of question with a warning about legal uncertainty. Now I start with the two histories that actually shape the answer: the graduate-worker line and the college-athlete line, both built on the same statutory word, employee.
At private universities, the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, administers the National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that protects employees who organise and bargain. Public universities mostly fall outside the NLRA because they are state employers, so their students, such as the roughly 48,000 University of California academic workers who struck in 2022, look to state labour law instead. The private-side rulings therefore set the standard that administrators and job candidates watch most carefully.
From Dartmouth Basketball to Columbia Teaching Assistants
The Board's test is not about whether work looks academic. It is about whether a student performs services for another party in exchange for compensation under that party's control. That common-law employment analysis has now been applied in two campus settings, and the results do not sit neatly beside one another.
In 2016, the Board held in Columbia University that graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants and research assistants at private universities are statutory employees when they perform work for compensation under university control. The decision overruled a 2004 case called Brown University and opened the door to graduate union elections at private campuses including NYU, Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, and MIT.
College athletes travelled a different route. In 2015, the Board declined to assert jurisdiction over a union petition filed by Northwestern University scholarship football players. The Board did not say the players were not employees. It said that asserting jurisdiction would not promote stable bargaining because top-division football includes many public universities outside the Board's reach. The employee question was left open until 2021, when General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memorandum declaring that certain college athletes at private institutions are employees and promising to pursue misclassification charges.
Dartmouth Basketball Turns a Memorandum into a Vote
On February 5, 2024, NLRB Regional Director Laura Sacks found that Dartmouth College's men's basketball players are employees under federal labour law. Her decision rested on the work players perform, the compensation they receive through athletic financial aid covering tuition, room, board, and related academic benefits, and Dartmouth's control over their schedules, training attendance, travel, and conduct. She directed a secret-ballot election for the 15 eligible players.
The players voted 13 to 2 on March 5, 2024, choosing representation by SEIU Local 560, a union with long ties to Dartmouth service workers. Dartmouth refused to bargain and asked the Board to review the regional director's order. The Board declined to reverse that certification in late 2024, leaving the employee-status finding intact while the college continued its litigation. The NLRB's college athletes guidance now carries a contested, real-world example rather than only a memoranda.
The Dartmouth case matters because it converted a general counsel's position into an election result at a single private institution. It did not settle the law nationwide, and the Board's composition changes with presidential administrations.
Graduate Workers Have a Longer, If Uneven, Bargaining Record
Since the 2016 Columbia University decision, graduate worker unions at private universities have bargained over stipends, health coverage, teaching loads, child care, and grievance procedures. At Columbia, Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW has become a visible example of how collective bargaining works inside a research university. At NYU, graduate employees have held union representation since the early 2000s, long before the Columbia ruling restored the private-sector framework.
Those contracts do not simply raise pay. They reorganise how departments classify assistantships, how teaching assignments are made, and how academic progress interacts with employment status. For PhD-track candidates, a graduate position may be governed by a collective agreement that specifies hours, reappointment procedures, and the boundary between training and labour. Many university job postings now note union status, and hiring committees increasingly expect applicants to understand what that means. The NLRB's student workers guidance explains the private-sector standard that sits behind those postings.
The graduate-worker picture at private universities is therefore more established than the athlete picture. But it rests on a Board decision that could be reconsidered as the Board majority shifts. A 2020 final rule briefly excluded student workers from NLRA coverage before the Board rescinded it in 2021. In early 2025, the Acting General Counsel rescinded a batch of prior general counsel memoranda, including the 2021 college-athlete guidance. The underlying Board precedents remain unless the Board reconsiders them, but the whiplash has been real for administrators trying to plan.
The Public-Private Fault Line
The NLRB's reach stops at the public sector. A Dartmouth basketball player under Board law is one thing; a University of Michigan or University of Georgia athlete is outside the NLRA unless a state legislature or state labour board acts. That split creates an uneven map. The same is true for graduate employees: a teaching assistant at a private university in Massachusetts is covered by the federal statute, while a teaching assistant at the public University of Massachusetts is covered by Massachusetts public-sector law, if a public-sector bargaining law applies at all.
This public-private fault line is why unionisation at one private campus has not spread across Division I athletics. It is also why the Board in 2015 worried about stable bargaining in a sport where most prominent public schools could not be required to sit at the same table. The legal architecture does the sorting more than the politics.
Policy Whiplash and the Current Board
The employee question has moved with the Board's political calendar. The 2016 Columbia decision reversed a 2004 precedent. The 2020 final rule attempted to exclude student workers, then the Board rescinded it after the administration changed. The 2021 Abruzzo memorandum on college athletes represented the General Counsel's enforcement position, not Board law. In early 2025, the Acting General Counsel removed that position from the agency's guidance. What has not changed is the Columbia Board precedent and the Dartmouth regional ruling, though the new Board majority can revisit either one through case decisions or rulemaking.
What Administrators and PhD Candidates Should Watch
For deans and provosts, the practical task is translation. If a private university's graduate assistants are not yet unionised, ask whether the appointment structure would survive the common-law control analysis applied in Columbia and Dartmouth. If it would, the cost of resisting an election may be greater than the cost of preparing to bargain. Institutions that have managed the transition well tend to share one trait: accurate data on stipends, hours, appointment categories, and supervisory relationships before a petition arrives.
For PhD-track job seekers and current graduate workers, the line between student and employee is no longer abstract. A collective agreement can determine whether an assistantship includes summer funding, how many sections a person can be assigned, and what happens when coursework falls behind. Before accepting an offer, read the union contract if one exists. Ask how tuition remission is treated and whether international student workers have dedicated support. AcademicJobs's coverage of graduate student unionization and contract negotiations in 2026 tracks how those details are changing campus by campus.
The athlete question is less settled. Administrators in private Division I athletics should read the Dartmouth regional director's decision alongside the Board's Northwestern ruling. The distinction that mattered at Dartmouth, a private institution with direct control over players and compensation, does not apply identically at public universities. Athletic directors are now asking what employment status would do to scholarship budgets, visa eligibility for international players, and the revenue-sharing framework already under pressure after House v. NCAA altered campus athletic budgets.
One small step for this month is less sweeping than it sounds. Find your institution's most recent graduate assistant or student-athlete job description and read it against the Board's control-and-compensation test. If the description uses the language of work, scheduling, and performance standards, your campus has been living in the space the law now occupies. The question is whether anyone is preparing for the next ruling.
Photo by Charles DeLoye on Unsplash